In the Ron Arad affair, all roads lead to Iran

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It is difficult to confirm recent reports in the Arabic press that the Mossad has carried out two operations to obtain information about the fate of Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad. The only thing that is clear is what Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in his speech in the Knesset last Monday: “Last month women and men of the Mossad embarked on a mission to locate new information about Ron Arad’s fate and whereabouts. This was a complex, large-scale and daring operation. We have made another effort on the way to understanding what happened to Ron Arad.”

The initial report, aired on the Saudi network Al Arabiya, which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, stated that the Mossad set out to take DNA samples from remains unearthed in Nabi Chit, the southern Lebanese village where Arad was held by his captors until he vanished without a trace in May 1988.

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“An operation like that could definitely have been carried out,” says Rami Igra, who served as head of the MIA department at the espionage agency for several years until 1996. “We have no information today, but we have gone out a number of times to look for information about the bodies of individuals missing in action – Eli Cohen, the Sultan Yaakov MIAs and other cases.”

The second report, in the pro-Saudi, London-based newspaper Al Rai al-Youm, presented a fantastic story involving the Mossad kidnapping a former Iranian general in Syria, spiriting him to an African country and interrogating him there to extract information about the Ron Arad affair.

Could the Mossad have initiated such an operation? Here the answer is in the affirmative. Is it worth it to endanger the lives of agents in an enemy country to obtain information about Ron Arad? Here, the answer is not unambiguous. It depends on the person heading the Mossad and the prime minister. Both must take into account that if the mission fails and the combatants are caught or, even worse, executed – it is they who will bear the responsibility.

Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen hinted earlier this year in the investigative television program “Uvda” that the agency refrains from sending “blue-and-white combatants” – that is, Israelis – on operations in enemy countries like Iran, and prefers to make use of what can be called its “international brigade.” In any case, the likelihood that an abduction of the sort described in the London newspaper is quite small.

Former top Mossad people say that such an operation could perhaps have been undertaken shortly after Arad’s disappearance, not only because of the short time that elapsed but also because then it was easier for the Mossad, as has emerged from foreign reports, to operate not only in Syria or Lebanon or Iraq, but also even in Iran.

Bennett: Mossad agents went on courageous mission to get intel on missing navigator Ron Arad

Israeli defense officials: operation to find missing navigator Ron Arad ‘didn’t justify benefits’

A screenshot from Outgoing Mossad chief Yossi Cohen’s farewell TV interview. Keshet 12

Rabin’s mistake

In the Mossad and in Israel’s intelligence community as a whole – including the Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence Directorate Units 8200 and 504 – two schools of thought have developed concerning the circumstances in which Ron Arad apparently died. The one supported by Igra is that the IAF navigator was held in a house in Nabi Chit, where two or more guards watched him.

During the time he was held prisoner, the air force attacked terrorist positions in the nearby village of Maydoun and as a result, the guards left their post and rushed to the village to find out what had happened to their families. At this point, this first version splits into two scenarios: The first is that Arad took advantage of the opportunity, freed himself from his restraints and escaped. The second is that the guards killed him.

The other school of thought is supported by Yisrael Perlov, Igra’s predecessor at the Mossad MIA department. According to this narrative, Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces abducted or bought Arad from the guards and subsequently, as the result of some mishap, he died in Iranian hands

A brief reminder: Arad’s Phantom jet crashed in October 1986 during a mission to bomb terrorist targets near Sidon. A technical failure in one of the bomb fuses caused an explosion of the ammunition close to the fuselage. Two crew members abandoned the aircraft and parachuted safely despite anti-aircraft fire from the ground.

Pilot Yishai Aviram was rescued in a daring mission by an IAF Cobra helicopter, but Arad was captured by Amal, the organization that vied with Hezbollah at that time for primacy in the Shi’ite community in Lebanon. Amal’s head of security in the Sidon-Tyre region at the time was Mustafa Dirani.

In the year and a half following the navigator’s disappearance, Uri Lubrani, coordinator of the activities of Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, conducted negotiations on behalf of the government for Arad’s release. To that end, Lubrani even met with the head of Amal, Nabih Beri, who later became the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament. Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister in Yitzhak Shamir’s government, believed that the price Beri and Amal were demanding was too high.

At that time, Rabin was subject to harsh public criticism over the “Jibril deal,” in which 1,150 terrorists were released in 1985 in return for three Israel Defense Forces soldiers who had been taken captive during the first Lebanon war. Rabin, as Lubrani told me back in the day, believed he could lower the price and therefore ordered a continuation of the negotiations. In retrospect, it is clear that this was a mistake.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Avi Ohayon / GPO

In any event, Dirani broke off from Amal at some point, established a small new organization of his own and joined forces with Hezbollah and the Iranians. According to Israeli intelligence assessments, in May 1988 either he sold Arad for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Revolutionary Guard or Arad was captured from Dirani and his organization, and either directly or through Syrian mediation transferred to Iranian custody.

In 1992, on the recommendation of Uri Sagi, head of Military Intelligence at the time, a team from the elite Sayeret Matkal special-ops unit abducted Dirani from his home in southern Lebanon and brought him to Israel. They hoped he would be able to fill in the intelligence gaps, shed light on the circumstances of Arad’s disappearance, say whether he had been killed and reveal where he had been buried. Dirani’s abduction was also supposed to allow him to be a bargaining chip in any future prisoner exchange deal. Dirani was interrogated by IDF Unit 504 and subjected to harsh torture. In his interrogation, he insisted that Arad was no longer in the hands of his organization.

In 2004 Dirani was released along with hundreds of Palestinian and other Arab terrorists in a deal in which Israel received the bodies of Sgt. Adi Avitan, Staff Sgt. Benyamin Avraham and Staff Sgt. Omar Sawaid, and the civilian Elhanan Tannenbaum.

The key is Tehran

The mediator in the 2004 deal was Gerhard Conrad, a top official in the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency. As head of the agency’s station in Damascus, Conrad met with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and other top people in his organization, and also traveled to Iran several times.

About two weeks ago Conrad granted an interview to Haaretz in which he spoke about his involvement in a number of prisoner-exchange deals between Israel and Hezbollah (Conrad was also involved in the return of the remains of soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, and in efforts to bring about a deal yielding more information about Arad), as well as with Hamas in the agreement to free captive soldier Gilad Shalit. In the wake of the new reports in the Ron Arad affair, I spoke with Conrad again last week.

Gerhard Conrad.SOEREN STACHE / DPA / dpa Pictures

“The circumstantial evidence points to the [fact that the] key to obtaining information about the Israeli navigator’s fate is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard,” he told me, adding, “I said to Hezbollah: We want him alive or proof that he is dead. Don’t tell me how it happened and how you found him, so you won’t be exposed to an Israel revenge action.'”

According to the German mediator, the Revolutionary Guard were present in and virtually controlled the village of Nabi Chit. By means of Conrad, in 2004-2005, Hezbollah transferred remains of bodies that turned out not to be Arad’s in the framework of the second stage of the Tannenbaum deal.

In this context, it’s necessary to mention the names of the two high-ranking Iranians who appear to have been more relevant than Dirani for obtaining information about Arad. Indeed, it might have been necessary for Israel to take action against them despite the fact that they were holding senior diplomatic and political positions:

One of these men is Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, who was the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1981 to 1985 and is considered to have been the founder of Hezbollah and the person who made it the most important Shi’ite organization in Lebanon. When Israel recognized the rising strength of Hezbollah, a bomb was sent in 1984 to Mohtashamipur’s office in the Syrian capital. It was hidden in an impressive book of photographs of Shi’ite holy sites.

Mohtashamipur was injured but survived the assassination attempt, which has been attributed to a joint operation by the Mossad and Military Intelligence. He was eventually appointed Iran’s minister of the interior.

The other high-ranking official is Hossein Sheikholeslam, who was among the Iranian students who took over the U.S. in Tehran in 1979 and held the American diplomats captive there for 444 days. This band of students was also the core that established the Revolutionary Guard.

Sheikholeslam went on to have close ties to that organization over the years but never held any official position in it. At the time Arad went missing, he was a special adviser to the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, and in his official capacity frequently traveled to Syria and Lebanon. In 1999 Sheikholeslam was appointed Iran’s ambassador in Syria and eventually he was elected to the parliament.

“I believe that these two men could have shed light on what really happened to Arad,” a source who is very knowledgable about the entire Ron Arad affair has told me. In his estimation, it is possible that the Revolutionary Guard experienced some mishap, perhaps at a low level in the field, and Arad was killed. “It is clear that Iran and Hezbollah were interested in Arad staying alive,” he says, “because they could have extorted many concessions from Israel, not just the release of terrorists.”

It should be stressed that at a certain stage Israel offered even to sell arms to Iran or to purchase oil from it in exchange for Arad. Iran has always denied that it held the Israeli navigator or that it has any information about him. However, on one occasion at least, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was at the time speaker of the parliament and later president of Iran, confirmed that the Islamic Republic knew about Arad’s situation up to a certain stage, but “the traces of him were lost.” Rafsanjani admitted that in the late 1980s to the United Nations secretary-general at the time, Javier Perez de Cuellar.

Rafsanjani died in 2017. De Cuellar died in 2020, Sheikholeslam died in 2020 of the coronavirus, as did Mohtashamipur about four months ago. Whether Ron Arad died at the hands of Hezbollah or of the Revolutionary Guard, there is no doubt that the highest echelons in Tehran, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, know what happened to him. However, is doubtful they will ever admit this or provide information, even if Israel offers it the sun, the moon and the stars. ‘Iran and Hezbollah were interested in Arad staying alive,’ says the source, ‘because they could extort concessions from Israel.’